Chapter 41
Allie could already taste it.
The fumes tickled her throat, sooty and nauseatingly dense. Like inhaling campfire smoke. She could feel the weight of it
descending the Chimney, a blanket of smoggy air. How long, already, had the engine been running unnoticed?
She watched Tess scramble along the chamber’s edge, clawing her fingernails on smooth flowstone, searching for handholds,
footholds, anything to climb.
It wouldn’t work.
Allie stepped out of the shadows, still gripping her rock. “Are we still fighting?”
Tess ignored her.
“Are we fighting or not?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Tess hurried from wall to wall, her voice choked with desperation. “We’re both fucking dead.”
Allie knew the four-story shaft was impossible to climb. She’d already tried it for hours today, searching methodically with
her fingertips for any thin gap. She’d even tried creative solutions, like tying her remaining rope to her water bottle to
fashion a crude grappling hook, but there was nothing up there to latch on to. Nothing worked.
Escaping the Chimney was impossible without a fixed rope. And that last surviving steel bolt, corroded by decades of moisture,
had been the only anchor point.
Now destroyed, too.
“There’s no way up.” Tess coughed, wincing at the acrid stench. “And we’re . . . we’re running out of air—”
Allie focused on controlling her own breaths. She inhaled through her nose, counted to four, and let it out through her mouth.
“Slow your breathing, so you use less of it.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“And sit down.”
“We’re dead anyway.”
“And limit your talking. That uses air, too—”
“What does it matter?” Tess shrieked, her voice raw.
Allie ignored her and sat down. She knew the vertical chamber was an hourglass filling with poison and every physical exertion
now had a cost. Every second, the air grew worse. With every breath, more carbon monoxide accumulated in their bloodstreams.
She pulled her lighter from her pocket and flicked it—just a weak orange flame the size of her thumbnail.
Her heart sank. Oxygen was already low.
“We’re . . . we can’t stop it.” Tess kept trying to scurry up the slick walls like a pathetic trapped animal, her boots slipping,
tears in her eyes. “It doesn’t matter what we do. There’s no way to shut off the Jeep from down here. It’ll keep running all
night, for hours and hours, until the entire tank is—”
“Tess, will you shut the fuck up, please?”
She froze, as if struck.
Allie flicked her lighter shut and stood up. She approached the pool’s edge and stared into the dark water, at her green glowstick
glimmering at the bottom like a bioluminescent cave worm. It illuminated that black underwater opening, no bigger than an
air duct. She took another measured breath.
“You’re wrong,” she said. “There’s one way out.”
Allie had never entered Worse Than Death before.
She always stopped her summer expedition groups at Razor Alley. The team was usually made up of amateurs, and after an oppressive
hands-and-knees crawl down the Drainpipe, everyone was muddy, sweaty, and ready to see the sky again. The Grim Reaper sign
did its job in deterring most sensible cavers, but there was always one or two who couldn’t resist the call of the depths.
Allie had always been curious herself, maybe more than anyone, but the entire group’s safety was her responsibility.
She knew all the horror stories. She’d read all about the ill-fated prospector and the ensuing rescue attempt, and even the
gory, but disputed, particulars of how they recovered his body. She’d memorized every detail of the man’s famously horrifying
death, true and mythic. She knew it was illegal to enter Worse Than Death under even ideal conditions, and right now she didn’t
have her pack, her gear, or even her map.
Also, conditions were far from ideal.
It was underwater.
“Tess.” She looked back. “You had a map. Where is it?”
But Tess wasn’t listening. She kept pacing in a tranced panic, her boots sloshing through the pool’s shallows, gulping more
precious air. Caught in her own cruel trap. Her boyfriend’s ugly steel knife was in her hand, and when Allie approached, she
slashed at her.
“I don’t give a shit about fighting right now.” Allie kept her distance, the rock in her hand. “Do you have a map or not?”
“I have it.”
“Show me.”
Holding the knife blade-out, Tess dug into her pocket and unfolded something. The map wasn’t even laminated. Just flimsy paper, already soaked.
“How long does it say Worse Than Death is?” Allie pointed. “How many feet?”
“It doesn’t say.”
“Look at the scale, dipshit.”
“It’s . . .” Tess’s voice broke apart. “Two hundred feet. Without air.”
Through a winding, hostile crawlspace.
In some places, ten inches wide.
Underwater.
It wrenched Allie’s stomach, the enormity of it. Claustrophobia and drowning: two primal fears combined. Only professional
cave divers would attempt such a plunge, and air tanks and flippers would never fit in such a confined tunnel anyway. Such
a distance would take several minutes to swim through, at minimum, and she didn’t have the training to hold her breath for
that long. To try it would be certain death.
Her eyes and throat burned with irritation now. A headache pierced her thoughts like two hot knives behind her eye sockets.
Soon, she knew, would come dizziness, fatigue, and confusion as her body started to shut down.
Then unconsciousness.
Convulsions.
Respiratory arrest.
Death.
“Fuck it.” Allie paced on shaky knees. “There have to be elevated spaces down there, cavities in the ceiling where pockets
of air might be trapped. Even if it’s just a small bubble. Anything to get to the next breath and keep going—”
“You’re insane.”
“When water rises, air has to go somewhere.”
“If you’re wrong, you’ll die.”
“I’ll die if I stay here, too.” Allie gazed down into the black water, inhaling slowly with her diaphragm.
Practicing efficient breaths, trying to prepare herself.
This would defy every self-preservation instinct in her body, her lungs, her brain.
It would be so much easier to sit and wait here with her former best friend, inhale more invisible poison, and let herself fall asleep.
Like euthanasia, the male killer had said.
Not happening, she told herself.
If I have to die today, it won’t be in my sleep.
“It’s worse than that.” Tess coughed. “You know it’s not just one tunnel down there, right? There are offshoots and dead ends,
like a flooded maze. It’s not even fully mapped—”
Yes, yes, and yes. Allie knew all of this already. Worse Than Death was an underground cardiovascular system branching into tangles of smaller
veins and arteries. Hitting a dead end inside a tight squeeze is already dangerous—without space to turn around, a crawling
human must instead wriggle in reverse and backtrack. This can take several minutes. Underwater, while holding your breath,
you don’t have several minutes. Underwater, one wrong turn is fatal.
“I can’t die here with you,” Allie said. “I won’t.”
“It’s suicide.”
“Stay. Follow. I don’t care what you do.” She waded up to her knees in icy water and felt a sickening dizziness fall over
her, like an instant inner ear infection. Another bad sign. She snapped her last glowstick, a fresh burst of green. Without
her headlamp, without her flashlight, it would be her only source of light underwater.
“I’ve done squeezes before,” she coached herself. “I can do this, too.”
“You’re really serious?”
“I have to try.”
This is my world, she thought. This is what I do.
“It looks like the tunnel goes straight for . . . about ten feet.” Tess studied the map with her flashlight. “Then it turns
and splits. I can’t tell, but I think the left side widens.”
That widened space, Allie knew, would be her best chance at finding a pocket of breathable air. If one even existed. This
would be a gamble with suicide, an underwater game of Russian roulette, and she couldn’t even be sure Tess was telling the
truth. Unknowns upon unknowns.
She flicked her lighter again—this time, just a spark.
No flame at all.
It was getting difficult to breathe. Every gulp of air felt strangely solid in Allie’s chest, like inhaling cotton candy.
Her thoughts were starting to swim with hypoxia. “So I’ll go left. Give me the map so I can see the rest of the—”
“I’ll tell you if we make it that far.” Tess stood up. “I’m following you.”
“Give me the fucking map.”
“I’m keeping it.” Tess tucked the wet paper into her back pocket, her boyfriend’s knife in her other hand. “For insurance.”
Allie felt a spreading coldness in her stomach. Her best friend had always been quietly savvy with calculations. Even here,
even now.
She considered fighting anyway in the dwindling air—hurling her rock at Tess’s face, feinting left, hitting right, trying
to rip the fragile paper away without damaging it—but her enemy still had that vicious combat knife. Even if Allie won the
fight, she’d likely take a stab wound, and then she’d never make the long swim. Fighting over the map was suicide, a waste
of air, energy, and time.
Whether she liked it or not, they had a fragile alliance.
Until we don’t.
Allie told herself she’d solve one problem at a time. That’s all anyone can do. When plans went awry in unfamiliar places,
she often remembered something her grandfather used to say: It is permitted you in time of grave danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge.
But this would be one hell of a narrow bridge.
“Fine. Try to keep up.” Allie waded up to her chest in chilled water, her bare feet touching jagged hidden rocks. Worse Than
Death was a keyhole in solid stone, like a vent at the bottom of a swimming pool. Her rock would only slow her down, so she
dropped it. In the tight tunnels there would be no space for shoes or a helmet or any gear at all except her water bottle,
which she clipped to her wrist. It was empty, drank hours ago, but that was the point—the bottle itself was an emergency air
reserve. One last breath on backup.
Treading water, she inhaled before the plunge.
“Allie, wait.”
She looked back.
“For whatever it’s worth”—Tess’s eyes glimmered—“I’m . . . sorry.”
The woman’s form seemed to shift in the watery green light.
Her face kept changing with the rippling reflections, her features swirling in inhuman ways, and Allie thought about those late-night games of Changeling at her cousin’s house, the room’s shared gasp of disbelief that the secret monster could be shy, innocent little Tess time and time again.
A changeling is a tragic creature, an imposter planted by the devil in the place of a stolen child.
They’re masters of mimicry, dirt and dead wood enchanted to look and sound human but lacking a soul, and sometimes changelings even unwittingly trick themselves.
Sometimes, as grown adults, they don’t even remember what they are.
Allie couldn’t tell if she hated Tess or pitied her.
She breathed deeply and submerged her face.
I can do this.
I can do this.
I can do this.
Please, God, help me do this.
Up close, the hole was even smaller than it had looked from the surface. The murky water was full of particles, like swimming
inside a snow globe.
Her lungs burned already.
Allie gripped the narrow opening with her fingertips, bit the glowstick with her front teeth, and wriggled inside. No time
to hesitate. The physical sensation of enclosure was immediate; knives of rock scraped her body on all sides, but she ignored
her fear and struggled through. She’d survived squeezes before, some almost as bad as this. The only difference was the water.
She estimated the tunnel was eighteen inches wide, and it would only get tighter.
She needed to breathe. Soon.
Caterpillar-crawling underwater, progress was painfully slow. Was she already too far down to swim back up? She reminded herself
that it didn’t matter—she’d only run feetfirst into Tess and drown anyway. Her only chance was moving forward. At all costs.
She felt the jagged walls change shape around her—yes, this was the turn Tess had described. She had to rotate onto her back
and squeeze, fighting her gag reflex as cold water trickled down her nose.
Next, the crawlspace split into two paths—a right and a left—but she already knew the way. Left. She twisted her body to fit with the green glowstick in her teeth, through swirling particles of ancient sediment—her lungs
were aching now, ballooning against her ribs—but a jolt of panic stopped her cold. Her stomach dropped.
Despite all her efforts, she hadn’t seen the map.
Only Tess had.
I can’t trust her directions.
Tess had every reason to lie to her, to send her down an unmapped dead end to drown. To die somewhere her body would never
be found.
Did she lie to me?
There was no time to swim back. Allie’s lungs were about to explode. Either way, right or left, led to a 50 percent chance
of drowning. Life and death would come down to this, a blind underwater coin toss. She thought of the way Ethan had flipped
that coin on their first date, their penny date, the expectant laughter between them as it twirled and caught a spark of sunlight.
At one intersection he’d fumbled the toss and it fell down to the pedals as he drove, so Allie unbuckled her seat belt to
retrieve it—Tails, she’d called triumphantly—and it would be the first time she’d touched Ethan’s leg, their bodies still then unexplored. “Little
Talks” by Of Monsters and Men on the speakers. The cinnamon-cookie scent of his cologne that she’d teased him for. God, she
wished to be in that moment and not this one.
Left?
Or right?
Allie had to make a choice. Her time was up. And if she chose wrong, she knew, it could be Tess telling this story to the
police instead.
Left, Tess had said.
So Allie went opposite and swam right.
I’m going to let you in on a secret, sesame seed.
Death is no big deal.
Really.
I mean it. I know this because I’ve literally done it before. I lost consciousness in the back of some nice Mexican dude’s
pickup with a swelling hand and woke up in a hospital bed without even realizing my heart had stopped. No angels or demons
or Heaven or Hell. Cardiac death was just a glorified nap. It felt like nothing at all. That’s the big secret of all mankind,
the thing everyone seems afraid to admit: to the beholder, death is no worse than falling asleep.
Heck, technically we’ve all been dead before, haven’t we? For billions of years across the span of time, while Earth was a
half-formed ball of magma, during the Crusades, during the Roaring Twenties, you and I were both as dead as doornails and
it didn’t hurt us one bit. Only life hurts. But oblivion? It’s painless.
That’s a promise, straight from your mama.
Whatever happens to us next, there is nothing to be afraid of.